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Debian Weekly News - September 7th, 2004

Welcome to this year's 35th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. We've been informed about a Debian translation party taking place on September 11th, in a place closed to Milan (Italy). Lars Wirzenius has recently updated the Debian lessons document that covers project management. The Hong Kong Aircrew Officers Association revealed that they use Debian for its fast setup process.

Welcome to this year's 35th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. We've been [1]informed about a [2]Debian
translation party taking place on September 11th, in a place closed to
Milan (Italy). Lars Wirzenius has recently [3]updated the [4]Debian
lessons document that covers project management. The Hong Kong Aircrew
Officers Association [5]revealed that they use Debian for its fast
setup process.

Sparc Upgrade Trouble. Joshua Kwan [6]noticed that currently one
can't run dist-upgrade from woody to sarge on sparc without upgrading
the kernel since glibc complains and refuses to install. However, to
upgrade the kernel, one first has to get the new glibc. Steve Langasek
has asked him to build transitional kernels which are also needed for
true [7]i386 machines.

Testing Migration uncovered. Andreas Barth [8]explained some bits of
the testing migration scripts that are of interest for Debian package
maintainers. In particular he explained what "outdated on ..." means
and how packages in testing affect the migration of more recent
versions. Manual [9]hinting is also required for packages with
circular dependencies.

Configuration of Authentication Methods. Fabio Tranchitella
[10]reported that he and Giuseppe Sacco are writing two small
utilities to update the pam modules configuration and to manage
/etc/nsswitch.conf. Their target is the automatic configuration of
[11]pam modules and the [12]NSS service for LDAP, NIS+ and other
network environments.

Supporting system-wide Environment Variables. Sami Dalouche
[13]wondered if Debian provides a similar mechanism to Gentoo's
env-update. Daniel Burrows [14]pointed out that the [15]Debian Policy
Manual says that a program must not depend on environment variables to
get reasonable defaults since not all shells support system-wide
configuration files where they could be set.

Removing non-free RFC files. Anibal Monsalve Salazar [16]wondered if
he needs to remove RFC files from the .orig.tar.gz archive as well,
since their license don't comply to the [17]Debian Free Software
Guidelines. Stephen Frost [18]added that he should ask upstream to
remove the files instead and Peter Eisentraut [19]asserted that
upstream may consider the removal as action to diminish the overall
value of their package.

Unofficial buildd Network shut down. Goswin von Brederlow [20]stated
that the unofficial buildd network he is involved with has been shut
down. As reason he reports about concerns which have been raised about
developers signing uploads built on systems that don't belong to the
developer or weren't accepted for the official buildd network. Ingo
Jürgensmann [21]added that this network has helped maintainers in
getting their packages into sarge and helped in speeding up the tiff3g
transition.

Unbuildable Packages in Sarge. Bastian Blank [22]reported about 250
packages that currently don't [23]build in a pure sarge environment.
He used a temporary i386 buildd network. Only some build [24]failures
are the result of build dependencies that cannot be satisfied in
sarge.

Serialising Cron Scripts. Abdullah Ramazanoglu [25]proposed to
serialise daily, weekly and monthly cron scripts so that they don't
ever run in parallel. His solution includes two daily scripts which
are run as the last ones from the daily run and which decide whether
to start the weekly or monthly batch of scripts. He later [26]noticed
that [27]fcron is already doing so.

Debian rejects Sender ID. The Debian project [28]announced that it
cannot implement or deploy Sender ID under the current license terms.
Debian would even be forced to remove Sender ID support from software
packaged in Debian that does support Sender ID upstream according to
the terms of the [29]social contract. This statement strengthened the
[30]position of the Apache Software Foundation.

Knoppix Variations on DVD. The October edition of the German [31]Linux
Magazin is a ten-year-anniversary edition and features a DVD with
eight different live CDs: [32]Knoppix, [33]Gnoppix, [34]Knoppix STD,
[35]Kanotix, [36]ZOneCD, [37]Insert, [38]GNUstep Live CD, [39]Lampixx.
Knoppix and its variants are based on Debian. The international
[40]edition seems to [41]contain seven of the eight live CDs.

Interview with FAI Author. In an [42]interview (German only), Thomas
Lange talked about the features of the newest [43]release of the
[44]Fully Automated Installer (FAI) for Debian. New features are
support for the upcoming sarge release, booting with either 2.4 or 2.6
kernels, and use of [45]libdiscover2 for hardware recognition. The
most important feature of FAI is however the good customisability,
making it possible to use it in lots of different environments.

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a different Debian
package is [56]featured from the testing distribution. If you know
about an obscure package you think others should also know about, send
it to [57]Andrew Sweger. Debian package a day introduced the following
packages last week.

Orphaned Packages. 1 packages were orphaned this week and require a
new maintainer. This makes a total of 176 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free
Software community. Please see the [62]WNPP pages for the full list,
and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if you
plan to take over a package.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the [65]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [66]dwn@debian.org.